Crimes against Our Country

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

The year of sickening global psychosis ended with virologist and vaccine-uberspecialist Dr. Robert Malone truth-bombing the Internet with three hours of straight talk about the US health authorities’ campaign to destroy the lives of at least half a million US citizens (so far) and, leading by example, to harm multiples of that number of innocent people across all of Western Civilization. Podcaster Joe Rogan assisted skillfully in an interview that is finally rocking the world out of an epic consensus trance. (Listen.)

By health authorities I don’t just mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, the designated National SARS-CoV-2 Coordinator, or his accomplices in the Dept. of Health and Human Services agencies, CDC, NIH, NIAID, etc., but also the purblind US medical establishment of actual doctors in clinical practice, researchers, hospital administrators, and pharma executives who acted with a collective stupid malevolence not seen since the crematory-stuffers of the Nazi bureaucracy carried out their final solution.

We know what you did. You engineered and patented a gain-of-function virus at the same time you conspired with pharma companies to devise and patent pseudo-vaccines, and then you loosed both of them on the public. You didn’t just fail to adequately test the “vaccines” cooked up by Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, but you deliberately botched the trails and lied about it. You created rich $$ incentives for hospitals to mis-treat Covid patients by failing to use known, safe, effective anti-virals. You conspired with social and news media to suppress information about those common anti-viral drugs that would have informed many patient’s decisions and saved thousands of lives. You treated late-stage patients dying of Covid-induced vascular disorder with the ineffective and toxic drug remdesivir that Dr. Fauci had developed unsuccessfully for an ebola outbreak years ago. (Nurses turned so cynical about the remdesivir protocol that they nicknamed it “run-death-is-near.”) You prompted government officials to lockdown society, force useless masking, and now to coerce “vaccination” by threatening to deprive citizens of their livelihoods.

The US Supreme Court will entertain arguments this Friday, January 7, to enjoin against “Joe Biden’s” mandates to coerce “vaccination” in companies that employ more than a hundred people and a separate mandate forcing vaxxes on staff at Medicare / Medicaid certified “providers” (meaning most hospitals and doctors’ offices). There’s a pretty good chance the court will decide against the mandates. They’re expected to rule Monday, January 10, the day that the mandates are supposed to take effect.

The government’s actions around the Covid-19 event look more and more to be deliberately and maliciously intended to harm lives and cause social and economic breakdown. In the last weeks of 2021, federal public health officers even blocked shipments of monoclonal antibodies around the country, despite their proven efficacy. The CDC scheduled the use of PCR tests for Covid-19 to end on December 31, after declaring them unreliable in August. Why the five-month lag? (To keep case numbers jacked up, that’s why.)

Every effort is being made to extend emergency use authorizations for unsafe and ineffective “vaccines” in order to sustain shields against liability for the benefit of their manufacturers. Pfizer refuses to release in the USA its FDA-approved comirnaty version of the EUA-protected BioNTech product for that reason. The Pentagon has lied and confabulated its use of the two Pfizer products in order to illegally force unapproved BioNTech vaccinations on enlisted men and women. Hospital directors, doctors, and their professional associations continue to persecute colleagues who speak publicly against the “vaccines.” The “vaccine” makers refuse to disclose the exact contents of their products, and were permitted to withhold data on safety trials until a half-century into the future. The obvious conclusion is that they don’t want the public to be informed about any of this. The net effect is that medicine in the USA has destroyed its own authority. Who can trust his doctor knowing that they’ve gone along with all this epic dishonesty?

The country is heading into an agonizing reality-test at a scale and speed never seen before in world history. You can already assume that government has lost control of the Covid-19 story. The Omicron scare is failing miserably. Lots of cases, few deaths, mild symptoms. Government’s credibility is shot. In the months ahead, we’ll learn just how harmful those “vaccines” were — especially among American children — as deaths mount from damage done to people’s organs and immune systems.

The perfidious news media is scrambling now to adjust its narratives, but they won’t escape the record of falsehood they’ve sedulously laid down. They can’t delete or rewrite every story in their archives, and many of these are printed out in hard-copy anyhow. Next, they’ll try apologizing. (“Sorry, but the pandemic drove us a little nuts.”) That’s hardly enough. They have to answer in courts of law — or else we must just declare the USA a lawless state.

The Covid-19 crimes against our fellow citizens amount to only one piece of a package of reality-tests coming our way in 2022. Do you think Special Counsel John Durham skulked off to drink pina coladas in oblivion after indicting a couple of errand boys (Danchenko and Sussman)? He is a hypersonic force orbiting over a well-known cast of political criminals who are headed for prosecution. Next up will be the train wreck of the US economy. Do you think the crimes around the 2020 national election are buried and forgotten? You’re in for some harsh surprises. Things have truly flipped. You just don’t realize it yet.

In a Dark Wood

By James Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Behold the photo (above) showing President “Joe Biden” getting his booster shot of the Covid-19 “vaccine,” with the news media clustered to the left of what is apparently a stage-set built in a larger chamber. Do you possibly ask yourself: why bother to build a set for this event in or under the White House somewhere — including even fake daylit windows — when there are any number of actual rooms in the White House perfectly suited to holding this grand event in real daylight? What is going on here?

And, by the way, how do we know that “JB” is getting an actual mRNA booster?  Or is it just 10 CCs of saline solution? Is not the syringe, after all, just another prop in the show? The video of this event was broadcast on cable TV channels and corporate media websites everywhere. None of them commented on the strange artificiality of the staging. And so, the mystery abides….

It only reinforces the creeping suspicion that absolutely everything about the “Joe Biden” regime is fake. And malevolently so. How else could it be that so many bad things are happening at the same time in this country if there was not some faction seeking to destroy it?

For instance, the vaccine mandates for medical personnel. In upstate New York, WNYT-TV reported yesterday that 200 employees of Albany Med, a large, regional teaching hospital, are placed on seven day’s unpaid leave prior to getting fired for refusing the vaccine. Andrew Cuomo’s replacement, new Governor Kathy Hochul, has blocked unemployment benefits for fired nurses and technicians if they persist in evading the vax. Doctors are included in the mix, too.

Of course, large numbers of health care workers getting kicked out of their jobs will only make it more difficult to care for patients — with Covid or any other health problem — so how does this policy help anyone? (Unless you consider that, with fewer staff on-duty, fewer Covid in-patients will be subjected to the medical malpractice of being placed on ventilators and treated with the killer drug Remdesivir.) Not only has effective early treatment with other drugs been banned from the official medical standards-of-practice across the USA, but mere talk about it has been banned, notably by Google’s YouTube app.

This coercion of health care workers is going on all over the country, of course, not just in New York state. These nurses and techs have been working around Covid patients for going on two years, and many of them have gotten the disease, with symptoms or without, conferring natural immunity. So, what is the point of forcing the vaxes on them? It is also a fact that vaccinated people are susceptible to catching the disease, and that, in any case, the vaccinated carry heavier viral loads than the un-vaxed, making them more efficient spreaders. It is also a fact that mass vaccination in the midst of a pandemic promotes the mutation of new variant viruses that increasingly are not affected by the vaccines.

Thursday night, CNN ran a segment with its house doctor, Sanjay Gupta, hectoring one Andrea Babinski, a La Crosse, Wisconsin, nurse who is quitting her job at Gundersen Hospital there rather than take the vax shot. Dr. Gupta, acting all perplexed, asked her why. Ms. Babinski said she was concerned about blood-clotting. Dr. Gupta dismissed her concern, saying, “If you’ve got a clotting disorder, you should get the vaccine.” Really…?

After the segment, Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper shook their heads in amused puzzlement over the nurse’s obdurate foolishness. They are apparently uninformed that the spike protein produced by the vaccine is known to bind onto the endothelial lining of blood vessels and promote blood clots, leading to a range of lethal events such as myocardial infarction and cerebral hemorrhage — heart attack and stroke — plus a broad array of organ damage and neurological disorders.

The Medicare Tracking System states that 48,465 people have died within 14 days of receiving a vax shot. Many had co-morbidities, of course, so not all the deaths can be directly attributed to the vaccines, but the public health authorities are averse to autopsies that might establish the truth of the matter. Anyway, the CDC has ruled recently that they will only count people more than 14 days out from a shot as being considered officially vaccinated — so none of those aforementioned deaths would have counted as vaccinated persons under the rule. Do you see how they are gaming the statistics to keep Americans as misinformed as possible?

Despite all the efforts to bamboozle the public, the “Joe Biden” regime has about run out the string on Covid paranoia, and wrung all of the political usefulness out of it. Going forward, it will only backfire on them. Do they think that wrecking hospital services while depriving thousands of health care workers of their incomes is a winning strategy? These are existential threats to US citizens.

Everything else under “Joe Biden’s” watch looks like a pyromaniac seeking to burn down the country. Over 10,000 Haitian interlopers have been surreptitiously dispersed from Del Rio, Texas, to nether regions of the USA. The government made no effort to vaccinate them — what does that tell you? Over 100,000 more invading opportunists from all over the world are reportedly heading to the southern border. A month after the fall of Afghanistan, and after this week’s hearings in both the House and the Senate, still nobody knows who gave the insane order to surrender Bagram Air Force Base outside Kabul. The Democrats’ dishonest “infrastructure” bill is wilting in Congress. Food and energy prices are rising fast, with shortages on the horizon. The capital markets are wobbling. And Special Counsel John Durham is back on the scene with more actions against Hillary Clinton’s favorite law firm, Perkins Coie, facilitators of the seditious RussiaGate campaign. Put it all together and you have a mechanism that looks like a “Joe Biden” toaster.

Off in a far corner of the News-O-Sphere, someone affecting to be John McAfee dwells on a Telegram channel labeled “OfficialMcAfee.” John McAfee, for those who don’t know, was the wealthy inventor of antivirus computer software who found himself at odds with the US government, went rogue, and supposedly committed suicide in Spain last June. Now, he has apparently turned up on this social media app in a series of videos and cryptic info drops. Whether he is actually still alive, or perhaps recorded these videos before taking his life, is not known. But he had threatened to release terabytes of digital evidence against his antagonists, including video of sexual misconduct among well-known political figures connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein, as well as incriminating documents from the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign files from 2016. Those info dumps have commenced and the figure who appears to be John McAfee in the Telegram videos says that the dumps will contain incrementally more shocking material for weeks to come.

All of this activity is obviously weird to an extreme never before seen in national affairs prior to the deep fake era — to the degree that reality is almost impossible to establish for now. We are a people lost in a dark wood. When you are lost, the first thing you must do is stop your useless, self-defeating locomotion, hunker down in place, and carefully assess what’s around you. Even if everything else is murky and perplexing, one thing is known: there is a way out of these dark woods. Remain calm and alert and it will reveal itself.

RAY McGOVERN: Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda

By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle. The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don’t know what’s going on.

The LSM should be confronted: “At long last have you left no sense of decency?” But who would hear the question — much less any answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine in journalism, is a thing of the past.

Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls.

The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided the occasion to “catapult the propaganda,” as President George W. Bush once put it.

As the the Times‘s Mark Mazzetti put it in his article Wednesday:

“Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.”

Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce: regarding that interference four years ago, and the “continued-unabated” part, you just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin’s pocket.

Incidentally, Mueller’s report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee’s magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages — and fortified. So there.

Iron Pills

Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller’s anemic findings in spring 2019. His report claimed that the Russian government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” via a social media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by “hacking” Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges could not bear close scrutiny.

You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller’s ipse dixit did not suffice, as we explained a year ago in “Sic Transit Gloria Mueller.”

The Best Defense …

… is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of its study — call it “Mueller (Enhanced)” — and the propaganda fanfare — come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.

One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he expects “developments in Durham’s investigation hopefully before the end of the summer.”

FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying on the president.

The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.

The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness — particularly with regard to Covid-19 — he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious.

So, the stakes are high — for the Democrats, as well — and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition (as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale (“enhanced” or not).

Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM — and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch “Mueller Report (Enhanced)” and catapult the truth now with propaganda, before it is too late.

No Evidence of Hacking

The “hacking of the DNC” charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.

Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.

Here’s a brief taste of how Henry’s testimony went: Asked by Schiff for “the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data”, Henry replied, “We just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”

You did not know that? You may be forgiven — up until now — if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The New York Times still publishes “all the news that’s fit to print.”  I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep Henry’s testimony hidden; Schiff’s record of 29 months will be hard to beat.

Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian ‘Tampering’

Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller’s findings last year enabled Trump to shout “No Collusion” with Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller’s findings.

After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned to keep it that way.

In Wednesday’s article, for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:

“Like the special counsel … the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was ‘no collusion’.”

How could they!

Mazzetti is playing with words. “Collusion,” however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.

‘Breathtaking’ Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)

Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report “showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin,” and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee’s vice chairman, said the committee report details “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections.”

None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known — even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort “sharing polling data with Russians” who might be intelligence officers. That data was “mostly public” the Times itself reported, and the paper had to correct a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.

Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to “justify” eavesdropping on Trump associate Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI’s decision to investigate Page. The committee may wish to revisit that endorsement — at least.

On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate.

Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that revealed that Steele’s “Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.”

Smearing WikiLeaks

The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly debunked myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears. Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report’s treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread:

2. the description of #WikiLeaks‘ publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee‘s Report appears a true #EdgarHoover‘s disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive

3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee’s Report completely rely on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo’s characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent approach

4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– “[WikiLeaks’] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies” (p.200)
– “WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries” (p.201)

5. it’s completely false that “#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value” (p.200) and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].

Titillating

Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday’s Times with the blaring headline: “Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump’s Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller’s Findings on Election Tampering.”

Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti’s piece will learn that the Senate committee report “did not establish” that the Russian government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn’t have] as leverage against him.” However, Mazzetti adds,

“According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they ‘might have had a brief romantic relationship.’

“The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow.”

This is journalism?

Another Pulitzer in Store?

The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.

And that’s not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, “The Plot to Subvert an Election,” trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.

That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.

In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter commented:

“The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia’s threat to U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media … Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the heart of the Times’ coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change.”

Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory

“It’s too much; it’s just too much, too much”, a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News.

It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what he titled “An Apology & Explanation” for “spotty production in recent days.” A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able to summon enough strength to write an Apologia — his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was “just too much”.

Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the “unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. … Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent … this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media.”

What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. “The U.S. media’s approach to Russia,” he wrote, “is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times’ or The Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? … Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia.”

Parry, who was no conservative, continued:

“Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for ‘hacking’ Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks.”

Bob noted that the ‘hand-picked’ authors “evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren’t asserting any of this as fact.”

It was just too much.

Robert Parry’s Last Article

Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether miss the importance of the text-exchanges.)

Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a “sanity check.” Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts; we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff investigating alleged Russian interference, until Mueller removed him.

Strzok reportedly was a “hand-picked” FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered “intelligence community” assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s right-hand lawyer.

His Dec. 13, 2017 piece would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article.  All three of the earlier ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here are the links.

Bob began his article on the Strzok-Page bombshell:

“The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling “scandal” into its own scandal, by providing evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.?

“As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American ‘deep state’ exists and that it has maneuvered to remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government’s intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump.”

Not a fragment of Bob’s or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled “Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?”, only three out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.

And so it goes.

Lest I am accused of being “in Putin’s pocket,” let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity included in our most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on “Russian hacking.”

Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and as a downtown morning briefer of the President’s Daily Brief.